Once, when I was a young creative trying to make my way up in the ad world, a good friend of mine – also a creative – told me “the originality of your ideas depend on the obscurity of your sources”. It sounded a bit douchy to me back then. It felt a bit like we should be stealing ideas left and right. As I matured as a creative, I realized more and more how much truth there was to that quote. It probably stemmed from one of Albert Einstein’s most famous quotes (at least among creative circles):

Creativity and surprise are closely related. Surprise comes from seeing something unexpected or experiencing something you’ve never come across before. Here’s the surprise: we can say the same things about creativity – anything truly creative will surprise you.

Creativity will always have an element of surprise.

Comedians can really attest to it. I rank stand-up comedians really high on the creativity scale – they know how to take seemingly mundane situations and offer an unexpected point of view that surprises us. That’s the punchline. But comedy is only one of the many facets of surprise.

The element of surprise helping comic creativity in a cartoon by Vic Lee

Apple, considered by many the most innovative company in the world, takes ideas seriously. More seriously than anyone else, probably. Apple’s future headquarters is proof of that: it has been designed with creativity in mind.

The building, described by Steve Jobs as “a shot at being the best office building in the world”, has been conceived in such a way to incentivize the exchange of ideas among employees of different departments and divisions. read more

We must not allow ourselves to get used to the marvels of life, both small and great. When we wonder and marvel, we take in every aspect of the subject of our wonderment. Those things we take in, that’s the very stuff ideas are made of. When we marvel we take in inspiration; we take in the puzzle pieces that will form the ideas we are still to come up with.

It’s a pity that us humans can get used to just about anything. It makes life less interesting. There’s a bit of Louis CK’s stand-up comedy that illustrates well what I mean – it’s definitely worth a couple of minutes:

In a brilliantly funny way he points out how we as a society just got used to amazing things. They don’t even really amaze us anymore. It’s part of human nature to take things for granted after we’ve had them for a while, but how can the things you don’t notice inspire you, even if they’re staring you in the face?

Chance can inspire great ideas. It’s the proverbial “Eureka” moment. Most of the times, though, we don’t have the luxury of waiting for chance to strike. The real world is full of deadlines and sometimes ideas need to come on demand. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could somehow force random events to bring us ideas? I believe we can.

Chance creativity can be turned into an idea generation technique. It has worked for me many times. Here’s how it works:

1. Remember the last time you’ve been somewhere you had never been before.

It can be anything: the last time you met someone new, or visited a new museum, or when you experienced a new part of town. You can also create a fresh new experience: go have lunch somewhere you’ve never been before. When we experience something new, we become more sensitive to the events around us. We can take advantage of that state and use those experiences as a starting point for creativity. read more

When George de Mestral – the inventor of velcro – noticed burrs stuck to his clothes, he did not dismiss the fact. Something that could be brushed aside as an insignificant event in his life ended up becoming the starting point of his legacy. Why did he not ignore the burrs, like most of us would have? Was it luck?

According to Dr. Richard Wiseman, “lucky folks – without even knowing it – think and behave in ways that create good fortune in their lives”. Dr. Wiseman ran an 8-year-long experiment involving self-proclaimed lucky and unlucky people. As it turns out, only a small percentage of good or bad outcomes in our lives is a direct result of chance:

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

There’s no reason to deny it: creation is a selfish act. We hear the stories about TV artists being a bit too touchy about criticism or the singer who throws a fit because things aren’t exactly the way he wants. Anyone who’s ever created something has felt at least a little bit like that. Doesn’t matter if it’s a company, a marketing plan or even a power-point presentation. When it’s your idea, it’s personal.

We know that great breakthroughs in creativity come from environments that allow creative people to exchange ideas. This is the whole basis of Steven Johnson’s research – you can find out more about it in this great video or watch his TED talk. An ambient where ideas can be exchanged is a breeding ground for innovation and we definitely need to share our ideas with our peers in early stages to allow for cross-pollination and improvement. That’s not the same as saying we should come up with ideas in groups. read more

I can’t write enough about how important it is not to start from scratch. Any new idea will only have value if it’s built from something that already exists. Our intention as creatives is always to improve on things that are already there by taking them forward to a place it’s never been before. The more advanced our starting point is, the further our new idea has the potential to go.

Now imagine we could build upon an idea that’s has been worked on and perfected for thousands of years. Wouldn’t that be great? It would save you millions of man-hours in ideation and R&D. Well, we can do that. Humanity has been doing it for a while, more deliberately within the last century.

The man who stole nature’s design

The best example is George de Mestral’s work. He copied one of nature’s designs for spreading seeds and re-purposed it in the fashion industry. He invented what we all know as Velcro. read more

Creatives in advertising usually fall into the category of “perfectionists”, which means they fight for the execution of their ideas to be as close to their vision as possible. That’s really our job, and there’s a whole structure in an ad agency to support that plan of action. Perfectionism gets in the way when it leads to procrastination – one of the types of procrastinators, according to Alina Vrabie in this article, and Joel Brown in this one among others, is the “perfectionist”.

At work, we do have deadlines that trump our will to keep working every little detail to perfection – we have to end up delivering what was asked of us at some point. But the greatest creative leaps in advertising or anywhere else come from proactivity. A perfectionist nature can get in the way of creatives ever completing a project that wasn’t asked of them (either a proactive idea at work or a personal project) because getting every detail perfect becomes overwhelming and we might end up dropping the whole project.

Salvador Dali knew what he was talking about

It’s very easy to hide under the snob cloak of perfection. It makes us feel we can call ourselves creatives without having ever brought an idea to life. read more

In a previous post I have mentioned the Brain Popcorn Effect and quickly defined it as “what happens when you say or show something that taps into your audience’s pre-existing knowledge and makes your message bigger”. In this article I’ll go into more detail about it.

Advertising has a very specific way of communicating – and we can learn a lot from it. The lessons go beyond advertising.

Throughout the years, advertising has sought to convey specific messages to the audience. Advertisers dealt with payed media space and limited time slots (i.e. 30s commercials). Because of that, and in the name of effectiveness, the ad industry developed a talent to squish a lot of information into a small space. We ended up being quite good at it. Advertising copywriters spend most of their time trying to use the least words possible to convey a message, and art directors are the most happy when they can convey a message with no words at all.

“Sorry for the long email. If I had more time, it would have been shorter.”

Here I share the secrets I learned by working in some of the best creative departments in the world. It's a good read for anyone in advertising, marketing professionals and those who want to be more creative at work – or life.